Response - Status.

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Rachel Tsang                                                                                                    4/28/2007

UNIT 1: RESPONSE

Our first few lessons were based on “Status”. We were placed into pairs, where one person was A, who would play the dominant role in the scene. We were given a different situation each time, where there was clearly one person there with more authority. We had to improvise a scene lasting about thirty seconds. Then we ended each scene, by marking the moment with a freeze-frame, so we could return back to the scene later. Then we changed partners and situation. One of the situations we were in was when I took on the role of a schoolteacher, who was questioning a pupil who had done something wrong. I was marching around the pupil, forcing her to admit the truth. My partner, Linzi, denied it all and was clearly upset that she had been accused. The scene came to a still and when we returned later, I revealed to Linzi what she had supposedly done, taken Mr Piggy off the shelf. This added a punch line to the scene and as it was a spontaneous improvisation, Linzi hadn’t a clue what I was accusing her of. So when I told her, she and I both had to communicate with each other well so the scene would flow on. This activity enabled me to work with others more easily and with more confidence.

         We worked in three’s and we were given a situation, where one person was being interrogated, about what was for us to decide. This activity allowed us to take on dominative roles. By using different strategies, we had to improvise a short scene in a given time of two minutes. We decided that Sam was to play the suspect who has been charged on suspected murder. Jess and I were the two police officers that were interrogating him. We went through different approaches to present the story across to the audience. We decided that Sam would already be sitting down at the table with Jess, and I would be standing behind him, to show the use of levels, which instantly shows my status compared to Sam’s. At first, the scene was straightforward, but we decided to add in freeze-frames, so we could allow character development for ourselves and for the audience’s ease of understanding of the situation we included character monologues, where only one person is speaking to the audience about their feelings and the other characters aren’t aware of it. We had written a monologue each and used parts of it in the appropriate places. I felt that this enabled me to get into role and I could feel the vengeance and hatred I had for Sam’s character. In the end our scene came across well with this added effect. We also added a twist to the end, where in fact the two police officers weren’t actually police officers, but had captured the suspect in revenge of killing their brother and they kill him in the end. This created a surprise ending, which added interest to our scene. We discussed how we could of used cross-cutting, where the scene is cross-cut backwards or forwards in time, so we could allow the audience to see to see a story behind the one presented and this would also enable us to develop our characters. This is also known as “layering”.

        We were given a piece of drama text, in form of a poem. The poem was about a captured person and the Germans would come in a take one “type” of person out of the place at a time. “In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist…” By using this poem as a stimulus, we had to devise a sequence of still images of freeze-frames to present the poem to our class.

        I was working in a group of six and we needed five different still images to represent each section of the poem. We had already gone through two different approaches involving freeze-frames before we made our final decision. Our first two ideas were, we thought, too complicated, it involved too much changes in position. We wanted something that would flow from one scene to another without too many complications and allow the message to get through easily. We decided to have a narrator. This allowed us to communicate the story across, but the narrator would also play the part of the last character. Then we had four others playing each one of the other characters and then one person as the German. We had arranged our set and used the space well to create our scene. Our set was like this:

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        We decided on placing each person in a different position to make the freeze-frames more interesting to watch. We had Dan, who was playing the German to use hand gestures, of pointing at the person who was going to be next out and at the end when the last person remaining was to be sent out, Dan would fold ...

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